Technology Futures

Reports are beginning to dribble out that Google is very close to releasing an "official" Google phone based on Google's Android operating system. Other mobile phone makers have been playing catch up with Apple's iPhone for the past two years, with little success--anyone seen a Palm Pre lately?

The "Did you know" video has been around for years, but I just noticed it has been updated recently. It's worth watching again, and really should be required viewing for community leaders who are skeptical that community investments in broadband are important for economic development and jobs growth.

This Forbes article is illuminating, as it neatly describes the Google vision for taking over and dominating every minute of our lives. Google provides a lot of good and even great tools, but the question is, "At what point does Google get so big and so powerful that it sucks all the oxygen out of cyberspace?"

Via Eldo Telecom, According to Kiplinger, the FCC may be considering expanding the Universal Service Fund (USF) tax to help fund the expansion of broadband into rural and underserved areas.

The Huffington Post has a couple of interesting articles on the direction of journalism today. It is a weird time for news, as the old media and the new media continue to collide. There is much finger pointing going around, with many old media journalists and owners trying to make a fiscally sound transition to new media while simultaneously complaining that new media bloggers and news aggregation sites (like the HuffPost).

MacWorld reports that iPod zombies are scaring motorists and causing accidents in Great Britain. iPod zombies are bicyclists who pedal down the road with their iPod headphones plugged in. Yes, this means they can't hear road traffic, and worse, are probably mentally wrapped up in listening to the music instead of being aware of the traffic around them. How big a problem is it?

Barnes and Noble is about to release an ebook reader called Nook. The bookseller and publisher wants to compete with the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader. It is easy to find people who say they love their Kindle, but I remain skeptical. I do think that within a few years, we will reading many more books using some kind of reader device, but I think the long-rumored Apple tablet is likely to crush these dedicated devices.

USA Today has an article noting some of the "Cyber Monday" shopping deals. But Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit says, "Who cares?" Reynolds makes a good point--that Cyber Monday evolved back when broadband at home was rare and people waited until the Monday after Thanksgiving to shop online--at work, where broadband connections made it much less frustrating. Nonetheless, online retailers expect big sales.

Jeff Daily at App Rising reports that Utopia, the big community-owned fiber project in Utah, is having substantial success getting homeowners to pay for the fiber coming to their homes--to the tune of $3,000 per home. This may sound like a lot of money, but the market value of a residential home with fiber increases by $5,000 to $7,000, according to a Render study.

In case you have been worrying about Planet Nibiru swinging too close to earth and destroying the planet in 2012 (just two years away!), the good folks at NASA have a handy FAQ on the whole 2012/Nibiru/doomsday thing. In case you have been living off the grid and only just yesterday got an Internet connection, the new movie "2012" posits that the mysterious planet Nibiru makes its every 3600 year swing near earth and just about wrecks the planet.

Spain has decided that broadband is a "right," and is going to beginning legislating price and speed for bandwidth services. In the short term, this may get more affordable broadband to some rural areas of Spain, but in the long term, this kind of legislation tends to discourage innovation and competition.

Bing hasbroken the 10% market share for online search. I continue to like Bing--it returns fewer and better results than Google.

If you ever wondered how the "free" video channels on the Intertubes could make any money, it is becoming apparent that the plan all along was to turn them into TV, complete with ads. And you can't turn the ads off. The stop button on the players does not work while the ads play.

Eldo Telecom reports that incumbent providers have filed thousands of challenges to broadband stimulus proposals. It is hard to tell from the USDA/NTIA rules just how the challenges will be handled. The ones I have looked at all pretty much take the line that the area covered in a proposal already has complete or nearly complete coverage.

Bing, the Microsoft search engine, can now return results from the Wolfram Alpha computational engine. So you can enter queries into Bing that require computation and the query gets passed to the Alpha engine and then returned via Bing. I continue to think Microsoft has a real winner with Bing, which returns better search results, in my opinion, than Google.